On a recent afternoon at San Pasqual High, football practice feels like a wake. The Fighting Eagles, once 7-0, are no longer undefeated.

After stunning No. 1 Mission Hills, they were the San Diego Section’s top team for all of one week. Then in their eighth game, with less than a minute left, San Pasqual quarterback Sebastian Tengan threw a touchdown pass to star receiver JaJuan Thomas to pull to within 38-36 of Rancho Buena Vista. But on the ensuing two-point attempt, Tengan was sacked, clinching a victory for the Longhorns.

Now the mood at practice, like the Fighting Eagles’ perfect record, is ruined.

Seventh-year head coach Tony Corley gathers his players in a circle. Forty-seven, with light blond hair and a full goatee, Corley is the kind of guy who reserves his harshest scoldings for referees — who thinks twice before raising his voice, even though his position often calls for it. A former Fighting Eagle himself, he leads dances at pep rallies, quotes Vince Lombardi and never closes his office door. If Corley’s players tear up saying they would run through a brick wall for their coach, it’s because they really would try.

At this practice Corley tells a story, reproduced here in abbreviated form:

The big animals and the little animals are playing each other in the Super Bowl. In the first half the rhino and its teammates rout the little animals.

In the second half the centipede single-handedly stages a comeback. The little animals go on to win.

Afterward the centipede is asked where it was in the first half.

“I was tying my shoes,” the centipede says.

For a moment the players stare blankly at one another. Then the silliness of the joke, the unexpected timing — it all sinks in. The boys throw back their heads and laughter returns to practice.

In hindsight they will say it is typical Corley, a football lifer with uncommon perspective and a mission statement of building “champions for life.” Amid the continuous loop of conditioning drills and film sessions, the coach has dedicated himself to developing young men into responsible adults, to the fostering of a Fighting Eagles community. Not every coach would bother with such an effort.

Related story

Now it is February 2011, and Corley sits in the doctor’s office, bracing for the unknown. A nurse stops by and leaves a folder in the room. Corley’s wife, Debby, reaches for the file.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Tony says as they wait for the doctor.

“They’re my records,” Debby replies.

Married for more than 15 years, Tony and Debby have built a comfortable life together: he the coach of a resurgent program, she the mother of three active children. In the fall Lindsey, the oldest, will be a freshman at San Pasqual, where Tony and Debby were high school sweethearts.

Like his older brother, Jack, Tony wore No. 62 for the Fighting Eagles. Timid and unsure of himself, he morphed into a confident force on Fridays. As a defensive lineman he collected 16 sacks in a season, a school record to this day. After realizing the limits of his abilities in his first and only season at Palomar College, he returned to San Pasqual as an assistant to then-head coach Mike Dolan.

Division I quarterfinals

Who: El Camino (5-6) at San Pasqual (9-1)

Where: Golden Eagle Stadium, San Pasqual High School

When: Thursday, 7 p.m.

Debby Parker was a grade older than Tony and several levels more outspoken. At first San Pasqual didn’t have a girls’ soccer team, so she talked her way onto the boys’. She danced in school plays and made friends wherever she went. One Wednesday night she introduced herself to Tony at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido.

They dated for nearly three years before Debby transferred from San Diego State to Chico State. Over the next eight years they gradually fell out of touch, traveling separate paths 600 miles away. Strong-willed and independent, Debby met new friends and pursued an English degree. Meanwhile, Tony joined his brother on Dolan’s staff. He grew to love the camaraderie of coaching at his old school, the satisfaction of molding young men not unlike himself.

Tony Corley poses for a San Pasqual football photo during the early '80s.

+Read Caption

Tony Corley poses for a San Pasqual football photo during the early '80s.

One day Tony happened by the motorcycle shop in Escondido owned by Debby’s parents. He stopped to catch up with Debby’s mother, Marie, who mentioned that her daughter had returned to town.

Soon Tony and Debby were dating again, as if they had been all along. Now, however, both of them had matured. Tony would later say their initial parting was the best thing that ever happened to him. They married in August 1995.

Together they raised three daughters who inherited Tony's blond hair and Debby's love of everything Disney. Tony carried them on his shoulders after football games, taught them how to play soccer and softball. Debby poured herself into becoming a full-time mom, volunteering for every field trip and leading each of her daughters’ Girls Scouts troops. She drove them between school and dance recitals, bringing along a rack with all of their outfits. Three times a year Tony, shuffling around on a replaced knee, grinned his way through a father-daughter dance.

In 2007 Dolan retired after 21 seasons. He’d already nominated Tony, who had coached everything from defensive line to receivers to linebackers, as his successor. When Tony told Debby the news, her eyes lit up. “Heck yeah, Tony,” she said. “This is what you should do.”

After Tony took over as the fourth head coach in San Pasqual history, Debby virtually became another assistant. She recorded defensive statistics during games, organized lunches for the coaches while they watched film on Saturdays and hosted the team for dinner.

“She always had a hug for everyone,” says senior running back Peter Ricardez. “She was just a warm person.”

On Friday nights Tony and Debby stayed up late discussing the game. Mostly Debby listened, but she also shared her own observations, especially if San Pasqual’s triple-option offense or its defense, Tony’s specialty, had faltered. More than a few times, Tony noticed, she pointed out things he had missed.

“As competitive and focused as Tony can be, Debby was more so,” says Andrew Clark, a former San Pasqual quarterback who now serves as both offensive coordinator and athletic director.

“They complemented each other really well,” says Joan Bohnstedt, who co-led Girls Scouts troops with Debby and whose daughter danced at the same studio as the Corleys’. “They didn’t expect each other to be everything. They were just very supportive.”

That’s why leading up to that day at the doctor’s office, Tony felt they could overcome whatever it was Debby was feeling. After all, they had endured eight years away from each other. They had weathered a 21-game losing streak across Tony’s first two seasons as head coach before the team returned to the playoffs the next year.

Even before they started seeing doctors, when there were symptoms of a larger problem, Debby showed no fear. They were a tough couple, tough enough to deal with whatever was in that folder.

Debby opened it and looked down at her scan results. Several seconds passed. She looked up.

“It’s not good, Tony.”

Debby had been diagnosed with a disease that had grown into a grapefruit-sized tumor and spread throughout her body: stage IV colon cancer. The next stage was death.

Debby Corley was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in February 2011.
— Courtesy of Corley family

Debby Corley was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in February 2011.
/ Courtesy of Corley family

At any level, coaching football requires sacrifice. Being responsible for dozens of hormone-addled high schoolers may be the most exacting job of all. The hours are long, the pay modest, the preparation endless, the parents incessant.

From that first season in 1986, Tony Corley loved the job. Under the previous head coach, Bob Woodhouse, he had gone from shy teenager to steady leader. In players not much younger than himself, Corley saw an opportunity to restart the process.

Besides, it was a chance to connect with his brother. Jack, two years older, and Tony had never been particularly close growing up. Now that both of them were working together, they figured it was a chance to bond like they never had.

The football office at San Pasqual already felt like home. It felt even more so with two Corleys in the room.

In time they would be joined by other alums such as Clark, the offensive coordinator who played on the 1997 championship team; Jay Parker, Debby’s brother and the JV head coach; and strength coach James Eidson. This season there are, counting volunteers, at least 10 former San Pasqual players on staff. Jack and Tony’s father, also named Jack (everyone calls him “Pops”), drives around campus in a yellow-painted golf cart, handling the equipment and lending a wise ear to coaches and players alike.

Ask those around the program what keeps folks coming back, and the answer invariably includes an unwavering love of traditions. San Pasqual football is loaded with them, from the lack of single-digit uniform numbers, to the No. 86 given to a standout linebacker, to the full-house, triple-option offense that has scarcely changed over the years.

Woodhouse, who died two years ago, started several of these rituals, including the act of San Pasqual kickoff teams bowing to the home crowd before each kick. Those kickoff teams are known around campus as the “Kamikazes,” an adaptation of former LSU coach Paul Dietzel’s “Chinese Bandits.”

Dietzel isn’t the only pioneering coach to have inspired a Fighting Eagle staple. There is Joe Paterno, who, speaking at a clinic in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, encouraged coaches to give their programs a distinctive brand. Woodhouse and his assistant, Dolan, responded by introducing diagonal stripes to the sides of San Pasqual’s uniforms.

There is Lou Holtz, who contributed two of the Fighting Eagles’ three basic team rules: 1. Do what is right. 2. Do your best. Rule No. 3? The Golden Rule.

Then there is Jim Kunau, who built the Orange Lutheran High football program into a CIF Southern Section power. In 2007 Kunau spoke at a clinic in Fullerton about his program’s mission, “Champions for Life,” about his goal to produce students who would lead by living Christian principles.

Corley, who was preparing to succeed Dolan, emailed Kunau and asked permission to borrow many of his coaching philosophies. Kunau happily agreed.

Soon a version of “Champions for Life” came to San Pasqual, though in reality the objectives had been in place long before Corley got the job.

“Bob Woodhouse brought it and Mike Dolan improved it, and it was in my hands now,” Corley says. “I just wanted to put a name to it.”

At San Pasqual the tenets of “Champions for Life” are reinforced among the varsity, JV and freshmen from the beginning of two-a-days. Coaches discuss the importance of academics, drug-free living and community service. Showing up is big: Miss one practice and you don’t start. Miss two practices and you don’t play at all.

Jack Corley recalls how during the 1982 season, four key starters skipped a Wednesday practice to see The Who in concert. That Friday all four players remained glued to the bench in a loss to Carlsbad.

“We missed the playoffs by one game,” Corley says.

Rare has been the player who has gone through the program and complained its standards were too harsh. The grateful ones, the success stories, are more common. Like Marquez Herrod, the homeless orphan who became a standout defensive end at Colorado. Like Daniel Minamide, the quarterback who went on to play defensive back at Harvard. Or like Tyler Tony, another former Ivy League recruit who plays running back for USD and still visits Tony Corley at San Pasqual.

“When (my son) Ben went through the program, the first year was an 0-10 season,” says Monica Hofstetter, whose younger son, Jack, is a senior linebacker at San Pasqual. “But it didn’t matter to me. I volunteered to the program because I thought my son’s character was being built.”

In her 1969 book “On Death and Dying” psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced her theory of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

To those around Debby Corley following her diagnosis, she seemed to skip the first four stages altogether.

“She told you she had cancer like she would tell you she had a cold,” says Bohnstedt, Debby’s friend from dance and Girls Scouts.

But it went beyond acceptance. At first the Corleys saw every doctor they could, determined to find a miracle.

When it became clear the cancer would win in the end, Debby did what she knew best: She organized.

She kept taking the girls to the dance studio, the rack with all of their outfits in tow. She kept attending every football game, her stat sheet in hand. She kept showing up for school events, kept volunteering for field trips.

Though treatment made her schedule doubly taxing, Debby’s friends rarely saw her down. She and Tony openly talked about her struggles, about the side effects of the chemotherapy, about the three-plus hours of surgery that removed the tumor but could not stop the spread of the cancer.

On the day of the surgery, Debby told Jack his brother would need him more than ever. Through coaching together, Jack and Tony had indeed grown close. Ever since high school, though, Jack and Debby had butted heads; they were both opinionated go-getters with a common interest in the same person.

“That day at the hospital, I’ll never forget,” Jack says. “She was the first one to bury the hatchet. It really blew me away. I gained a whole new respect for her right there and then.”

Jack’s wife had lost her first husband to cancer. Jeanette Haines Corley knew the best thing she could do was simply to listen and understand.

“I told Jack there’s more that I wish I could’ve done,” Jeanette says. “I can’t really say we could offer a whole lot other than ‘we’re here for you.’”

Jack, Jeanette and other family members buoyed Tony and Debby. Yet even then, having done everything themselves for so long, they were reluctant to accept help from outside. Then the response overwhelmed them.

Through her 19-month battle with cancer, Debby kept holding the family together: (from left) Sydney, Lindsey, Mallory, Tony and Debby.
— Courtesy of Corley family

Through her 19-month battle with cancer, Debby kept holding the family together: (from left) Sydney, Lindsey, Mallory, Tony and Debby.
/ Courtesy of Corley family

Emails flooded Tony’s inbox. He heard from teachers, coaches, former teammates and church members. Some shared their own stories of dealing with cancer, stories he had never heard before.

“People don’t talk about it, that’s what I found,” Tony says. “Unless it’s to help somebody.”

Well, now everyone wanted to help. One football parent had a refrigerator delivered to the Corleys’ house and plugged in outside the garage. Bohnstedt created a sign-up list on TakeThemAMeal.com that was forwarded to families from school, football, dance and Girls Scouts. Soon the refrigerator was stocked with spaghetti, chicken casseroles and pot roast — so much food that Bohnstedt had to reduce the meal schedule to two days a week.

Another parent, an oncology nurse, became Debby’s patient advocate, free of charge. Friends from the dance studio drove the girls to and from practice. Tony’s assistants began taking care of film and other administrative duties, giving him a few extra hours every day with his family. Mike Dolan and long-time assistant Paul Moyneur, both of whom had retired, returned to volunteer as coaches during the 2012 season. The Fighting Eagles reached the playoff semifinals, where they fell to eventual runner-up Mission Hills.

In the offseason Tony and Debby pulled their daughters out of school — the first time they had ever allowed such a thing — to take a vacation to Hawaii. They stayed at the Aulani Disney resort on Oahu and created a week’s worth of memories. That Debby had to lug around a colostomy bag hardly mattered.

“It was probably the best time we’ve ever had,” Tony says.

There were bleak days, too. After Debby seemingly responded well to the first months of treatment, a scan in November 2011 brought back devastating results: The cancer was even worse than before. There would be no miracle.

That afternoon following practice, Tony was walking across the field with Andrew Clark, who could see the pain and anger in the coach’s face.

“Is everything OK?” Clark asked.

“No,” Tony said, breaking down and falling into Clark’s arms as he shared the news.

On Sept. 7, 2012, Debby attended San Pasqual’s game at Del Norte. On the road the Fighting Eagles rallied from a halftime deficit to win, 17-7.

Afterward on the field, the football players surprised Debby by singing “Happy Birthday.” She had turned 47 that day.

Eight days later, after 19 months of fighting the cancer, Debby died at home, surrounded by family.

Tony coached the following Friday. The staff and the players all wore black wristbands embroidered with the initials DC in purple, Debby’s favorite color. One parent had paid for the entire order. Those in the crowd wore purple plastic bracelets inscribed with the words REMEMBER DEBBY. Every game in the North County began with a moment of silence.

The Fighting Eagles overcame another deficit on the road in a 21-14 win at Mt. Carmel. Senior linebacker Kyle Hendrickson, who wears the iconic No. 86, recalls a muffed punt that could have been lost, that instead “took another funny bounce into our hands. Footballs don’t do that. It was like she was looking out for us.”

At Debby’s memorial the next morning, Tony said the same thing.

“There were some weird bounces in that game,” he said, “and I can’t help but think my wife had something to do with some of those bounces bouncing right back into our arms.”

Bohnstedt shared how Debby had kept her sense of humor until the end, even after the cancer had spread to her liver. How after the jaundice had turned her skin bright yellow, Debby joked, “I could land planes at Lindbergh Field at night.”

Ashton Corley, Jack’s daughter, read a letter her aunt had composed. Among wishes for her daughters, relatives and friends, Debby asked Tony to continue coaching, to “keep building champions for life.”

How do you respond to a loss?

On Thursday night Golden Eagle Stadium will fill with the sounds of playoff football. San Pasqual, which earned a No. 1 seed and a first-round bye after going 9-1, will host El Camino. The winner advances to the Division I semifinals, one step away from the title game at Qualcomm Stadium.

As they have since the 1980s, the Fighting Eagles will enter the stadium wearing yellow, hooded windbreakers over their uniforms, playoff mohawks under their helmets. They will jog through a yellow archway with EAGLES painted on it. The hoods will come off, one at a time. Just another San Pasqual tradition.

The Fighting Eagles, who rarely use a player both ways, are deep. Twenty-one of the 22 starters are seniors. Several of them played Pop Warner together, for the fathers who now operate San Pasqual’s chain gang. Jack Corley, who coaches the team’s freshmen, calls this year’s seniors the most impressive class he’s seen in three decades.

Hendrickson, the team’s 6-foot-4 middle linebacker, will wear the wristband with Debby’s initials. He has every game since she died. So have many of his teammates.

The same wristband will be on one of Tony’s forearms. A purple bracelet will be on the other. Here, on the football field, he feels close to Debby. Coaching has been therapy.

“The thing football did for me was, it gave me three hours a day where I could be normal,” Tony says. “She knew I needed that.”

Last offseason was brutal. There were times when the laundry was done, the house cleaned and lunches made, and he would be left with time to think. Too much time.

“You’re just kinda staring at the walls,” Tony says. “There’s nobody to bounce things off of, so you can get lonely. To me that was one of the hardest things.”

He worries about raising three daughters without their mother. Then he reminds himself of the help he has, the uncles and aunts and grandparents who all live close by. He reminds himself of the San Pasqual community.

Tony and daughter Sydney (right) perform a choreographed dance, set to Miley Cyrus and the Monday Night Football theme, at a recent pep rally. They first unleashed the routine in October, winning a competition for Sydney's class and helping raise nearly $2,700 for Stand Up To Cancer.
— Andrew Clark

Tony and daughter Sydney (right) perform a choreographed dance, set to Miley Cyrus and the Monday Night Football theme, at a recent pep rally. They first unleashed the routine in October, winning a competition for Sydney's class and helping raise nearly $2,700 for Stand Up To Cancer.
/ Andrew Clark

So he continues coaching and teaching. He knows he has to, for his daughters, for his players, the ones he talks to about becoming champions for life. Earlier this month he was named the San Diego Chargers Coach of the Week, a distinction given to high school coaches “who have made a difference in the lives of their players, community and schools.”

“Unfortunately, you look at the percentages,” Clark says. “Some of these kids are going to have to go through something like this in their lives. For them to have seen the grace and strength in which Tony’s family approached this as a unit, he set an example. They followed and were tremendous.”

On Thursday night, as they have for decades, they will enter Golden Eagle Stadium to the sound of Judas Priest’s “United.” They have heard it hundreds of times, yet the chorus will still give them gooseflesh.

United, united, united we stand

United we never shall fall

United, united, united we stand

United we stand one and all

Shortly before kickoff they will gather in a circle around Tony, holding hands. The coach will say a few words. Then they will converge on him, arms raised to the sky.

And in that moment, the man who lost the love of his life will be surrounded by a family, dozens strong.